Threepersons Hunt

by Brian Garfield

  “Apache?”

  “Nobody around there ever talked to him beyond hello-how’s-the-weather. Most of the neighbors assumed he was some relative of hers, but she never said. Kind of a good-looking guy, drove an old Volkswagen beetle, kind of beat-up, dark blue. No license number, of course, they’re not snoops.”

  Watchman had seen a car that matched the description. It had been parked in the gravel patch between the trading post and the council house. It wasn’t there now. Coincidence? Maybe; there were plenty of blue VWs around.

  “The picture I get,” Stevens said on the line, “he was nice looking and he wore pretty good clothes but he didn’t look like he was rolling in money. Informant tells me he never spent the night with her. He’d show up evenings maybe once every three, four weeks. Take her out to dinner now and then when she could get a sitter. The kid was in day school up there, by the way. Pretty good school.”

  “Private school?”

  “Yeah. Now here’s the kicker—that blue beetle was parked outside her place the morning she died. Just before she went out and killed herself, he was there. Or at least his car was.”

  “Or a car that looked like his.”

  “Well sure. But what the hell. Man you better believe I’m trotting this phone bill over to Lieutenant Wilder the minute it comes in. Okay, let’s see.… Item. The neighbor saw the beetle take off that morning and it ran the red light at the corner. I just throw that in for free—no extra charge—suspicious character breaking the law left and right.”

  “Sounds like he was rattled.” Watchman thought about it and said, “Look, in the morning you call the Phoenix coroner and find out about that autopsy on her.”

  “Okay. I’m not finished yet.”

  “Then keep going.”

  “All right, let’s see. Item. Same neighbor-lady told me there was a prowler around Maria’s house last night, drove off in a station wagon. Probably Joe Threepersons but she didn’t get much of a look. She’s got a hell of a nose on her, this woman. Lives right across the street.”

  “What did she mean by prowler? Did he break in?”

  “Not that she saw. When she saw the guy he was peeking in the windows. Then he drove off.”

  “That had to be Joe. All right, what else?”

  “That note we got? The anonymous tip? No fingerprints on it. The typewriter’s an Olympia manual with pica type. Ordinary kind of paper and all.” Stevens coughed away from the phone and his voice came back: “Thing is, the trail still stops with those stolen horses up there.”

  “For all we know he’s in Johannesburg. Forty thousand people disappear every year in this country and a lot of them never get found.”

  “You sound like you haven’t turned up a damn thing up there.”

  “You could put it that way,” Watchman said. “It goes that way, they tell me—we’re supposed to get used to eating a steady diet of wild goose.”

  “Well hang in there, kemo sabe.”

  5.

  When he opened the phone-booth door it extinguished the interior light and he saw them standing by his car.

  Five of them. One was digging around in his mouth with a toothpick. They all looked like delinquents, overage and gone to seed. He recognized one of them, the very big one with a gut on him: he’d seen that one sitting on the tailgate of a pickup truck swigging canned beer, down at the horse camp where Joe Threepersons had run off with the herd.

  The man was genuinely huge. The skin of his face was suspended from massive cheekbones and he probably weighed 280 pounds, part lard but mainly muscle.

  They weren’t exactly Nature’s noblemen. The big one put the comb away in his pocket and held Watchman’s eyes as long as he could without stirring up violence in himself; then the left side of his mouth flicked upward and he glanced at his friend with the toothpick.

  It broke the tableau and Watchman started down the porch steps. An engine raced momentarily and to his right he glimpsed a familiar grey pickup truck parked at the roadside. The headlights threw a splash of illumination as far as the gas station but the pickup had only one taillight and that was burnt out.

  The big man stirred. He wore a maroon shirt with balloon sleeves and tight chinos on his long legs, cinched up so that his belly made a precarious overhang.

  Sicksweet exhaust fumed from the pickup. Watchman walked toward them conscious of the weight of the automatic against his spine, and conscious of how long it would take him to get at it if he had to.

  “You want something?”

  None of them spoke; neither did they back away. The squat one kept digging at his teeth.

  Watchman put his weight on the balls of his feet and flexed his knees a fraction—he wanted to be loose because he might have to move quickly. He said, “If that’s your pickup you’d better get that taillight fixed before somebody rear-ends it.”

  The big one slid his childishly challenging glance from Watchman’s face to his boots and when he had completed that gesture he made a little movement of his left hand, out to one side, and the four men behind him walked away toward the pickup.

  The big one said, “Enju, yutuhu nda.” It was addressed to Watchman and it wasn’t friendly. Having spoken he wheeled slowly toward the pickup. The other four had climbed into its open bed; the big one got inside and smoke spurted from the ramshackle truck.

  The breeze tousled his hair. He watched the truck recede, defined in silhouette against the flood of its own headlights. It had been an immature warning; but was it because he was a cop—any cop—or was it because of Joe?

  The crumpled folds of the mountains had turned black with shadow. Sky merged with earth along the uncertain twilit horizons. He walked around the Volvo but the hubcaps were intact and the car appeared undisturbed.

  It had been an irritating day filled with wasted words but there was a pattern to it like the design of a Chinle blanket and he got into the Volvo and drove up toward the roadhouse in an alert frame of mind because he had a feeling Joe was here. Right around here somewhere.

  You didn’t explain such feelings; you ignored them or you rode with them. There was more to be learned from what people said than could be found in their words. It was their faces and voices and the way they looked away; it was in the way they used their hands and the way they breathed.

  They resented him because he was the outsider but that still left too much out. They were overreacting to him. They were lying to him, almost all of them, and it was because the town had something to hide. Joe, probably. Joe, and something more. If it wasn’t guilt it was suspicion, and not all of it was directed at Watchman.

  There were layers of secrets; what made it strange was that it was an Indian town—such intrigues were expected in Anglo communities but that was because they weren’t real communities, they weren’t tribes. Indian skeletons were usually on view to all because there were no closets to hide them in.

  But here dark spirits had been stirred up. And he was beginning to sense that if Joe wasn’t dug up soon there would be an explosion of violent forces.

  He parked in front of the Broken Arrow and grinned at himself for his melodramatic imaginings. But when he got out he locked the car.

  6.

  They were mainly pickups and dusty Chevys and Fords and that was why he noticed the Volkswagen. He couldn’t determine the color in this light but it was a dark shade. He found it unlocked and looked for the registration slip but it wasn’t in the car; he made a note of the license number and went into the roadhouse.

  The lights were no brighter than before but this time he didn’t have to accustom his eyes to a change from bright sunlight. The place was well populated but not overcrowded. The same one-armed bartender and a helper now, and a man at the register in place of Luxan’s teen-age daughter. The bartender was very fast, probably faster than most who had two arms—he had to prove something.

  Watchman didn’t wait in the doorway. It was too much like putting himself in a picture frame for inspection. He went to the near e
nd of the bar and waited for a beer and when it came he carried it toward the back of the room. Men at the bar turned to glance at him and there was enough challenge in their eyes to show they knew about him. But it wasn’t a gamut; their resentment only simmered.

  The decibel level of talk had dropped when he had entered. The room had had time to size him up and the talk resumed its former level until Angelina Threepersons left the corner table and carried her guitar to the stool on the bandstand. Then some of them stopped talking and looked at her, anticipating her song. Some others kept on talking as if they’d heard her before and didn’t think much of her act.

  Watchman took a small table and tipped his chair back against the wall. There were a few Anglos in the place— three in a bunch at the bar and two others, singly, talking with Apaches at tables. They were probably local sawmill technicians and livestock managers but ten years ago you wouldn’t have found them in a place like this. The old barriers had come down. Allowing an Indian girl to sing non-Indian songs would have been unthinkable in an earlier generation.

  The girl tuned up, not hurrying; she bent her ear over the f-holes of the guitar and ignored her audience.

  There was a mournful quality to her, as if her gauntness were the product of sadness. The lamps bleached her face of color; it was a tired face, striking, the bones as fragile as a sick child’s but the mouth and eyes creased by life. Once he’d had to tell a nine-year-old girl her puppy had been run over. Before she’d absorbed it completely and started to bawl there had been an expression on her face, quizzical and disbelieving and yet saddened and enraged all at once. Angelina Threepersons reminded him of that.

  When she started to sing he was surprised by the repertoire. They were Kristofferson songs—Sunday Morning Coming Down and Bobby McGee and Help Me Make It Through The Night—and she did them well with a country twang and a husky deep delivery. But she sang without looking at her audience; she was singing for herself. Her music went into Watchman’s bones with melancholy lassitude.

  A fat Indian got up from his seat to Watchman’s right and carried his empty glass toward the bar for refilling; it left a gap through which Watchman saw two familiar faces—Dwight Kendrick’s and Thomas Jeffords Victorio’s. Kendrick swiveled his gaze around and it passed across Watchman casually and kept turning until it reached the girl on the bandstand; for a moment Kendrick pretended he hadn’t seen Watchman but then he thought better of it, looked back and nodded. He said something and Victorio looked over his shoulder and lifted a glass of whiskey in Watchman’s direction. It might have been an invitation but Watchman ignored it. He acknowledged the attention with one hand and returned his glance to the girl. A few minutes later he picked up movement in the edge of his vision and turned to see Kendrick and Victorio making their way to the door, and out.

  After the third song Angelina carried the guitar back to the corner table and left it standing up on the seat of a chair. She walked to the bar. Her legs weren’t particularly long but she had a languid way of moving, or perhaps again it was weariness. She was wearing a black cowboy shirt with pearl buttons and a sheathed red skirt that almost reached the floor. The points of her shoulders were pronounced, exaggerated by the masculine tailoring of the shirt. The bartender spoke to her and handed her a tray and she carried it toward the front of the room. Watchman followed her with his eyes. Her black hair, tied in a bun, bobbed among the tables.

  He drained his beer and when she was on her way back with a tray of empty glasses he waved her over.

  “Another beer?”

  “A little talk. When you get a minute.”

  “You must be the Navajo.”

  “Highway Patrol,” he said.

  He reached toward his wallet but she spoke quickly. “I’d sooner not talk here.” She looked back across the room but the bartender was talking to someone. She turned her face toward Watchman and her quick smile was pretty but it was mocking and left an uncertain aftertaste.

  “Name a time and place,” he said.

  “Have you got your car here?”

  “Beat-up Volvo right outside. What time do you finish here?”

  She looked down at the tray, thinking, and then she gave him an up-from-under glance. She seemed amused. “We’re not too crowded. Let’s get it done with—I’ll be out directly.”

  He left and sat in the car with his elbow out the window. The spot where the dark Volkswagen had been was empty. He hadn’t noticed anybody leaving the place except the two lawyers and Kendrick drove a Corvette. So it was Tom Victorio’s and that was no real surprise; Victorio had been sweet on Maria and he’d have needed no big excuse to go down to Sunnyslope to visit her while Joe was tucked away in prison.

  A surmise; a check on the license number would confirm it. So it puts Victorio at Maria’s house the morning before the breakout. How does that help locate Joe? It didn’t and he put it aside.

  She came out of the roadhouse and looked for his car. He flashed the headlights at her and watched her come toward him. Her stride was still lazy but he sensed the tension in her.

  She slid in beside him. “We can just sit here if you don’t want to waste gas.”

  “I like the way you sing.”

  “And I’m far too talented for this dump.”

  “You could be. If you worked at it.”

  “I guess I don’t want it that much.” She gave him a head-on look for the first time since she’d got into the car. “Are you a cop or a talent scout?”

  “Come on,” he said, “don’t get hard-boiled. I’m trying to find your brother, I’m not making a pass.”

  “Now that’s odd,” she said, “because I like to think I’ve learned to tell the difference between the serious customers and the ones that are just looking. Browsing, you know.” She was mocking him again. She leaned toward him, her left arm sliding across the back of his bucket seat. “I’m trying to buy my crippled nephew an operation so he can play the trumpet again. Would you care to contribute?”

  “It’s not your nephew I’m interested in, it’s Joe. Let’s talk about him.”

  “I can’t tell you anything you don’t already know, but I’ll go through the motions to save trouble.”

  “Can’t or won’t tell?”

  “Does it matter? Would you believe me?”

  “It’s my job never to believe anything too fast.”

  When she put her back against the passenger door and folded her arms he added, “You’re the one who can reach him if anybody can. I’d like you to take him a message. Tell him he’s in a lot more trouble if he keeps hiding than he is if he gives himself up.”

  “Why?”

  He hadn’t thought that question would have been first on her list. She was not without surprises—or candor.

  He said, “Because I have a feeling someone’s going to get hurt if he stays loose long enough.”

  “Maybe that was why he broke loose in the first place. Didn’t you think of that?”

  “I did, but I don’t have any facts.”

  “You must have some. Otherwise you wouldn’t have got that far.”

  She was giving him the first real break he’d had; there were admissions between the lines of what she was saying—her failure to deny the implications of what he had said. He wasn’t sure how to proceed from there; he didn’t want to scare her off.

  She waited and when he didn’t speak she said, “You’re kind of new at the job.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I’ve been questioned a few times.” She smiled; it was the same smile as before, it wasn’t completed and it left him uneasy. “I break the law a lot, you see. I’m an arch criminal, a menace to society. I smoke grass.”

  “Gee whiz.”

  “I wouldn’t have told you if I hadn’t thought you’d answer like that.”

  He said, “It’s my youthful honesty.”

  “No. It’s just that you’re relaxed. The ones that bust you for grass are the ones that twang like guitar strings. They’re upright
and pious and I think their parents must all have been drunks.”

  “It’s likely,” he said. “Tell me something, what does this mean—Enju, yutuhu nda?” He repeated it as accurately as he could remember it. The sounds weren’t unlike the Navajo but the words were strange.

  She laughed off-key. “Who called you that?”

  “A mountain in a satin shirt, driving a ’58 Ford pickup.”

  “Jimmy Oto,” she said. “It stands to reason.”

  So that was Jimmy Oto.

  She said, “It means … well. Enju means anything you want it to mean. Like ‘well’ or ‘alors’ or ‘como’ or what do they say in Navajo, ‘yatahay’?”

  “That’s pretty close.”

  “‘Yutuhu’ means Navajo and I’m surprised you didn’t know that. ‘Nda’ means white man.

  “That’s all?”

  “Well the way Jimmy Oto would say it I imagine it would come out meaning something more than just Navajo white man. More like Navajo son-of-a-bitch Uncle Tomahawk selling out to the white man.”

  “I could go home for that,” he said. “Here I thought he was putting the bad eye on me.”

  “For him it would amount to that. His crowd doesn’t believe in the old stuff.”

  “What about you?”

  “I believe in all kinds of things. You’d be surprised.”

  “I might at that. Some of the folks believe in it. Will Luxan said he’d heard Maria was witched to death.”

  “Maybe she was,” Angelina said.

  “Who by? And what for?”

  “A lot of people don’t like my brother. And some of them maybe wanted him to break out of jail.”

  He sat and waited for her to continue but she only fished in the pocket of her skirt and found a pack of cigarettes. She hunted around the dashboard and found the lighter and punched it. “This thing work?”

  “I don’t know, I never use it.”

  “Oh God. He doesn’t smoke. He drinks one beer. I’ll bet he eats spinach twice a week.”